“We’re not treating you unfairly, Sage. You’re hardly old enough to be completely independent and free to do anything you please,” my father finally commented in a calm tone. “We’re responsible for you and your actions.”
Was that commitment more than it was for natural parents? I wanted to ask. Did adopting me come with more responsibility for some reason? To whom else but themselves did they make these promises—some state official, or maybe my birth mother, whom I now believed they knew after all?
More than once, I had heard someone say, “You can’t choose your relatives.” But my parents could, and now that I thought about it, I could, too. I could decide one day that I’d had enough of them. When I was old enough, perhaps I could walk out that front door more easily than a natural child could. A natural child would still carry the mystery and the power of blood ties. She wouldn’t be able to look at herself without being reminded of the parents left behind. Their hair, their eyes, the shapes of their faces, and even the sounds of their voices were indelibly written into her very soul.
But not me. I had no one I knew written on my soul in any way, shape, or form. I was like an offshoot of some meteor sailing independently through space, maybe blazing once and burning out on my descent to somewhere I never intended.
I didn’t say anything, even though I wanted to continue to defend myself, to show some defiance. Yes, they had a parental right and obligation to know where I was going, whom I was seeing, and what I was doing, but did they have a right to know what I was thinking, too? Was I completely naked and forever exposed? Didn’t every child, adopted or not, need some privacy?
“When your mother or I ask you questions, Sage, it’s only out of the deep concern and love we have for you,” my father said, filling the void of silence. “It’s a parent’s job, responsibility, and obligation to do that. It’s just something natural for a parent to do. Anyone who doesn’t place the welfare of his child ahead of his own is a dismal failure.”
I looked down. I wished I were an angel, fallen or otherwise, and wings would sprout out of my back. I’d fly away instantly.
“I know there are parents who conveniently believe their children should sink or swim on their own, almost from the day they can walk and talk,” he continued in that same reasonable, calm tone of voice that always made it difficult to dislike him or even argue with him. “Maybe their own parents treated them that way, but more than likely, they are too self-centered. It should be natural for parents to protect and nourish their children in every way possible, no matter how old their children are.”
“Wild animals leave their offspring as soon as they can care for themselves,” I said. “Some consume their own young. It’s called filial cannibalism. Scientists believe they do it to ensure the production of healthier offspring.”
I wasn’t sure they understood what I was suggesting, but the moment I had learned about this in Mr. Malamud’s science class, I recalled my mother’s frequent threat to return me to the orphanage. She wasn’t threatening to eat me, to kill me, but she was threatening to put me back in a place where I could easily fade away and, in a real sense, die. The very fact that she could conceive of doing that filled me with fear that she could do something even worse to me.
“We’re not wild animals,” my father said.
I looked at my mother. She didn’t seem as willing to say that.
“If you’re especially tired or something serious is bothering you, we want to know about it,” my father added. He stepped forward to put his hand gently on my shoulder and then patted my hair and smiled. “We’re hoping you will always trust us enough to confide in us, Sage. Your trust is very, very important to us,” he stressed. “It’s actually our biggest worry. Can you appreciate that?”
“Yes,” I said, my same budding tears turning from cold to warm, now coming more from my heart than my rage.
“Well, then?” he asked.
I looked at my mother. How did she do it? How could she look at me and see so deeply inside me, no matter how I tried to disguise it? “I trust you,” I said, but I looked down instead of at him.
“No, you don’t,” my mother said. “You lied to me a while back. We both knew you had lied, and we waited to see if you would correct it, but you still haven’t.”
I looked up quickly. Uncle Wade had told them after all, I thought. That, more than anything, depressed me.
As if she could read my thoughts, however, my mother added, “No one had to tell us that, either. You’re not as good as you think you are when it comes to disguising deceit.”
Another girl my age would try to defend herself, perhaps pretend she knew nothing about it. She would twist and turn, looking this way and that, for an acceptable escape. She would feign innocence, act as if she had no idea why her parents would be so angry. Maybe she would turn the argument on her parents and accuse them of something, make them defensive. I’d overheard many girls talking about how they got away with things at home by doing just that. I didn’t know if I was capable of doing something similar.
I always wondered if their mothers and fathers did the same sort of thing when they were their children’s ages. Why wouldn’t they recognize the deceptions and rationalizations? They had walked the same paths, had played the same parts, and were characters in similar stories. Did every young person live with the same fantasy, that their parents were perfect people? Didn’t they ever hear their parents’ friends say, “I hope my children never do what I did” or “They’d better not ever do what I did”?
My guess was that most of their parents pretended to believe them or let themselves be distracted to avoid a crisis. Was it Uncle Wade who once told me that you couldn’t lie to a liar? Someone who’s had a history of being deliberately deceptive recognizes the symptoms in someone else. I knew now that my parents hadn’t told me the truth about myself or about themselves. That rule surely applied to them, if it applied to anyone, I thought. I might as well confess.
“I was afraid to tell you,” I said.
My father stepped back. He looked at my mother, who nodded confidently like someone who wanted to remind someone else she had been right all along.
“Tell us what?” my father asked.
“One afternoon, Mother asked me if I had gone into your office to snoop. When you two were out of the house, I saw you had left a file drawer open, so I went in to look in the drawer. I was going to tell you soon.”
“Soon?” my mother said skeptically.
“Yes. I told Uncle Wade about it. He thought I should have told you and that I should tell you soon.”
My father’s eyes narrowed, not with suspicion as much as with pain. I knew immediately that he was wondering why I trusted Uncle Wade to talk to more than I trusted him. I did feel very bad about it, but what was I going to tell him? The truth? That I didn’t go to him because I was afraid he would tell my mother? If I couldn’t keep secrets from them, they couldn’t keep them from each other.
“Go on,” my mother said. “You might as well tell us everything about it now.”
I thought about the things that bothered me the most and decided to start with that. “I found the picture I once drew of my birth mother, a picture I gave you and you hid. There was a photograph with it, and the woman looked similar. I don’t know how I drew it to look so similar, but is that a photograph of my birth mother?”
“Yes,” my father said, before my mother could deny it.
“Then you did know her?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t just find me in an orphanage at eight months old?”
“No. We told you that to make it less painful for you when you were old enough to understand. Even a little girl would be upset about it, and you’ve always been mentally beyond your years. We didn’t mean it to be a hurtful lie. We were going to tell you all about it soon.”
“Soon?” I fired back, sounding just like my mother.
“Your snooping made it sooner than we intended,” my mother said, t
he corners of her mouth dipping.
“What else did you find?” my father asked, waving his right hand to shove aside that issue.
“There were pictures of two other children. Who were they?”
“Children who needed to be adopted. They had too many serious mental and emotional problems baked into them,” my father said. Those were almost Uncle Wade’s exact words. “We didn’t think we could handle them. That’s when we thought that if we were going to adopt a child, it would be better if it was an infant.”
“I found my birth certificate. You told me you had lost it.”
“We don’t have your original birth certificate. We were going to reveal the one you found when we had explained it all to you,” he said. “You probably saw diplomas and old photographs.”
“Yes.”
My mother looked at him sharply, her eyes suddenly two swirling orbs of cold fear.
He smiled. “Just things we did when we were younger, posing, going on movie sets.”
“Why are they hidden in a drawer?”
He shrugged. “We have lots of old pictures in closets and boxes. Your mother doesn’t like cluttering our house with them.”
“I also found a small box full of strange things, bones.”
“It was something your uncle brought back from one of his trips. He knows that we’re both a little superstitious. It’s the way we were brought up. It’s not something we like people to know about us,” he said. “That’s why your mother gave you that amber necklace.”
“And that rock with a hole when I was younger, the one she hung on my bed?”
“Exactly,” he said.
“That garland of garlic, the knife I saw you put under one of the front steps, all of that?”
“Our superstitions. So you see, we can be foolish, too.”
“Is that why you always hated my stories and dreams?” I asked my mother.
“Yes,” she said, looking like she hated admitting it.
“And why you worry about me so much?”
“That’s it,” my father said. “Now, is there anything more you want to tell us?”
I wondered if I should mention anything about how I had closed the file drawer, but since I wasn’t sure of that myself, I thought I had told them enough. They looked satisfied anyway. I shook my head.
“I hope this is the first and last time you keep something secret from us, Sage,” my father said. “No matter what you do, what you hear or see, we’ll be there for you first. Okay?”
I nodded. When I looked up, I saw that my mother was not as confident of it as he was. I couldn’t blame her. After all, she had reason not to be. I wasn’t telling them everything, and right now, I had no intention to. I was afraid that, like Uncle Wade, they would not only advise me not to think about it anymore but also forbid me to do anything.
And I had a plan I was now determined to follow.
What I had to do was push it as far back in my mind as I could, so that I wouldn’t look like a plotter and my mother wouldn’t realize there was something more. I avoided them both for the rest of the day by pleading too much homework. I found myself behaving just like any of the other girls by keeping my parents distracted.
“It’s like all our teachers knew we were going to a party this weekend,” I moaned at dinner.
“I’m sure none of them expected you to leave it to the last moment,” my mother said. “You should have done most of it the day of the party.”
“Probably,” I said.
They both seemed to buy my act this time. But I couldn’t help wondering. Were they just playing along to see how far I would go? Even though they told me things they had hidden from me, I still felt there was more, lots more.
I went up to my room after dinner, ostensibly to do this neglected schoolwork, but I had really done just about all of it. I had started to read ahead in my history text when I had a phone call. It was Ginny. I was both surprised and grateful that she was calling me after I had disappointed her.
“You missed a great time after the party,” she said. “Half the time, I found myself defending you, but I think most of the girls bought your excuse for not coming with us.”
“It wasn’t an excuse. It was the truth. This was the first party without adult supervision I’ve been permitted to attend. If I didn’t obey the curfew, it would be a long time before I would be able to go to another.”
“Whatever. Everyone wants to give you another chance, especially the boys. Until now, we’ve all been impressed with how smart you are. You give good advice, but you should try not to sound like someone’s mother or grandmother when you do it. And don’t waste your time with that Cassie Marlowe. She’s a loser with a capital L.”
“I feel sorry for her.”
“Yeah, well, feel sorrier for yourself. You have more boys after your bod than any of us. Jason was the most pathetic about it. He was actually crying real tears when he started talking about you. Of course, that might have been the X he took,” she added with a laugh. “He claims you’re like a bullfighter.”
“Bullfighter?”
“A moving target. You hold up promises like a red cape, but as soon as he charges, you pull them away. It was hysterical. He fell asleep the whole way home. Anyway, we’re planning on doing something this weekend again. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. And remember,” she added, “stop being someone’s therapist. If you have to give anyone advice, give it to us.” She laughed again and hung up.
I lay back on my pillow, thinking. A part of me wanted to be what Ginny had described, concerned more about myself. It was what Uncle Wade had advised, wasn’t it? And I had little doubt it would be what my parents would advise if they knew enough about what I had been planning.
Later, when I started to get ready to sleep, I heard that dark voice whispering. It was that different-sounding voice again, deeper, darker than the voices that would comfort me. It was coming from the far right corner of the room, where there was that shadow that shouldn’t be there because it was so lit up.
I was thinking maybe I would listen, but then another voice came from another corner of my room. It was louder, stronger, and more familiar. It was a voice I always had trusted.
And it changed my mind again.
“Everything your parents told you today about what you found in the file drawer,” it began, “was a lie.”
8
One of the special gifts Uncle Wade had brought back for me after one of his magic tours was a quill pen he had found in another antiques store he had discovered. This time, it was when he had free time in London. He said the quill was from the early nineteenth century, and although there were no identifying letters, marks, or symbols on it, he claimed it had once belonged to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the famous poet. As with most everything he found in antiques stores, he also assured my parents and me that it was far more valuable than the store owner knew. It was another one of his rare finds.
“Use it only on a special occasion,” he told me. “It has magical qualities. Anything this old does.”
It didn’t take me long to realize that he favored things from way in the past, whether it was furniture, clocks, knives, mirrors, anything, as long as it was at least a hundred years old. Time was full of mystery, and mysteries were full of magic.
Other girls my age probably would laugh at him and put whatever he had given them aside and rarely, if ever, look at it, much less use it. And when they were older and received these presents like I did, they would accept such gifts to be polite, but they would be full of skepticism about their origins and even feel disappointment, maybe even a little foolish. Who my age wanted to brag to her friends that she had a hand mirror once used by some important French baroness or one glove worn by Catherine the Great? What friends of mine would be impressed or even give it a second look, especially my new friends? If they didn’t say it, they would certainly think it. “Couldn’t your uncle have brought back something contemporary that was pretty to wear?”
But
none of them had someone like Uncle Wade, who had an energy about him like no other man I had met, including my father. It was difficult to be skeptical about things he claimed when you could witness him performing acts that seemed to defy the laws of physics. The ability to do these things gave him a wisdom, a real power to convince anyone of anything, most of all me.
I had used the magic quill to write my parents birthday wishes. When I picked up the quill and dipped it in the ink, the right words did seem to come magically, words that impressed and pleased them. But this time, it was going to be very different. I was using it to write something terrible, something that would bring a lot of pain, trouble, and turmoil. Nevertheless, it felt right to use it for this purpose.
One of the magical things it did, I thought, was change my handwriting to such a dramatic extent that no one, no handwriting expert, could compare my regular handwriting with it and confirm that it was I who had written it. I wore the pair of white silk gloves Uncle Wade had given me years ago, too, gloves he also claimed were worn by an Italian countess in the eighteenth century. There would be no fingerprints on the paper or the envelope. For now, I wanted anonymity. Obviously, if my parents found out I had delivered this letter to the school nurse, they would be enraged. I had no doubt of that.
Dear Mrs. Mills, I wrote to the school nurse.
I am writing to you as a friend of Cassie Marlowe. I know that anonymous letters like this immediately raise the suspicion that the author is just trying to cause someone else trouble and embarrassment, but please believe me when I tell you that I am not afraid for myself as much as I am for my family if I revealed my identity.
Nevertheless, I am even more terrified for Cassie Marlowe, because I believe she can’t go on much longer suffering what she is suffering. I fear for her very life.
Cassie Marlowe is being sexually abused by her own father. You can begin by asking her about the black-and-blue marks on her arms. If you can win her trust, she will tell you what is happening to her. I am sure she will reveal the truth. She is rarely permitted to have anything to do socially with kids her age, and when it is absolutely impossible to prevent it, she is severely restricted. She’s almost made to avoid having friends. There is an ugly reason for this, why she is practically a prisoner in her own home.
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